Teaching basic lab skillsfor research computing

Extended Examples

We'd like to add more extended examples to this course, both because they're fun and because they're a good way to show how our topics relate to one another. Right now, we have:

an entire lecture on invasion percolation (which we'll shorten),

phylogenetic tree reconstruction, and

how to recommend papers to people.

We plan to add a simple N-body simulation (easy to do badly, motivates testing, visualization, and a bit of numerical analysis), but after that, we'd like to find some examples from psychology, linguistics, and other areas that are starting to do more computational work. Parsing text files full of patient records, putting the information in a database, doing some analysis using SQL, and visualizing the results is one possibility; what else would you recommend or like to see?